Marcy Kahan

Playwright, Radio/tv/screenwriter

Marcy Kahan is an award-winning radio and theatre playwright and screenwriter. Her plays include: 20 Cigarettes (Soho Theatre, 2007), a stage version of Nora Ephron’s When Harry Met Sally (Theatre Royal, Haymarket, 2005) and Intimate Memoirs of An Irish Taxidermist (Perrier award, 1986 Edinburgh Festival). Marcy’s screenplay Antonia & Jane was the first television film to be given cinematic distribution by Miramax and won a Gold Plaque award for best original screenplay at the 1991 Chicago Film Festival.

She has written more than 30 original, highly urbane plays for BBC Radio, including five series of Lunch: a platonic romantic comedy (2015 BBC Audio Drama Award for Best Scripted Comedy); The Playwright & The Grammarian (‘wonderfully incestuous’, the Times); Everybody Comes to Schicklgruber’s, a comedy about Hitler’s brother, the pastry-chef (which won a silver Sony award in 1997); a sextet of plays about her hero, Noël Coward; and her very first radio play The Contemplative Life which starred Alan Rickman as a homicidal Benedictine monk.

Marcy’s dramatisations for BBC Radio include Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential; Timur Vermes’s Look Who’s Back; Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections; P.G. Wodehouse’s Psmith in the City; Tolstoy’s War and Peace (with Mike Walker; 1998 Talkie award for best drama); The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (BBC/CBC co-production) and The Wizard of Oz. In 2007 Marcy participated in the first Jerwood opera-writing programme at Aldeburgh. She returned to Aldeburgh in 2010 as a visiting librettist for their young musicians programme.